Utilizing acoustic methods to investigate word-boundary vowel sequences in one Arabic-Spanish contact situation

Abstract

In the modern world, the globalized nature of both Arabic and Spanish has led to distinct contact situations in different countries. This investigation focuses on word-boundary vowel sequences, which are typically realized as hiatuses or diphthongs in native Spanish speakers. By contrast, native Arabic speakers will not utilize diphthongs across word boundaries, instead preferring to lengthen one vowel or produce a glottal stop (Mohamed 2020).This investigation examines how these distinct strategies are reconciled in the contact situation of Moroccan immigrants to Spain by utilizing acoustic methods to identify and qualify the bilingual approach to word-boundary vowel sequences. This investigation compares monolingual Spanish speakers (n = 3) to two groups of L1 Arabic (Arabic-dominant and Spanish-dominant, n = 7) in Alicante, Spain. Participants completed a language survey, a reading task, and a sociolinguistic interview. All linguistic tasks were recorded and analyzed acoustically on Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2023) utilizing the waveform and spectrogram to identify the strategies utilized to resolve the phonological boundaries. Results from Spanish-dominant bilinguals differ from previous studies in Puerto Rico (Mohamed, 2020), suggesting that this language contact situation differs in Spain and opening up new avenues for study in this area.